IT SEEMS THE NEWS these days is filled with tragic shootings, many involving children or multiple victims. Between this carnage, and the fantasy bloodshed of the entertainment media, most people are convinced that guns equal violence. But for anyone who was raised to enjoy hunting and target shooting as sport, there is the realization that this perceived violence is the rare exception rather than the rule. There are 80 million gun owners in the United States, and the vast majority of them are decent law-abiding citizens.

There are those who point to our more than 250 million privately owned firearms and say that it is their presence that promulgates bloodshed.

Homicide and juvenile violence have declined significantly in the past five years. This is due in part perhaps to three strikes laws removing habitual offenders and our good economy. Yet ever increasingly there is the call for more laws to prevent gun violence. This is because crimes involving firearms are sensationalized by the news.

Anti-gun forces claim to have moral superiority; they blame gun violence on the NRA's defense of an "individual rights" interpretation of the Second Amendment. The NRA is repeatedly bashed as being responsible for any criminal misbehavior involving firearms, despite its aggressive campaign to institute the harshest penalties for violent criminals.

Why don't we see protests in front of wineries when a drunken driver kills someone? Why aren't there editorial cartoons depicting liquor store owners as culpable for alcohol-related accidents and violence?

What we do see is a system where a 6-year-old problem child lives in a crack house, kills an innocent young girl with a criminal's stolen gun, and the politicians and opinion-makers blame the NRA and all gun owners. It is something that shouldn't have happened, and wouldn't have happened, if officials had done something about the child's earlier acts of inappropriate violence.

We are told that the solution to tragedies like this is to be found in passing reasonable gun control laws. What are these reasonable laws, and how will they prevent the criminal misuse of guns? What is being advocated today by Al Gore, Dianne Feinstein, Kevin Shelly and others is the licensing and registration of all handguns, and in some cases, of all firearms.

First and foremost, such registration will be another source of tax revenue. It will be expensive to own a gun and therefore undesirable for many. It will, in fact, only affect the honest citizen and not the criminal. How will this reduce crime? It won't keep drug dealers from acting irresponsibly, and it won't prevent criminals from obtaining stolen guns. Is there another, more subtle reason to legally entangle honest gun owners with bureaucratic red tape? Twenty-five years ago, Nelson "Pete" Shields, the founder of Handgun Control Inc., revealed his strategy to New Yorker magazine. "The first problem is to slow down the number of handguns being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is to get handguns registered. The final problem is to make possession of all handguns and handgun ammunition -- except for the military, police, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs and licensed gun collectors -- totally illegal."

It was after horrific murder rampages in both Britain and Australia that those countries banned all guns and used gun registrations to confiscate millions of arms, including valuable collectibles, historic weapons and antiques. Law-abiding, peace-loving citizens found that they no longer had a right to own any firearm through no fault of their own.

First, we are told there are "too many guns in the streets of America" by those who equate gun ownership by honest citizens with crime. Then comes the call for licensing and registration. History has shown that confiscation is the next step.

Could something like that really occur in our country? Most gun-control advocates claim they only want to make our children safer, without infringing upon the rights of law-abiding gun owners. But if you look closely at what they are saying, their real intent becomes all too clear.